Interjurisdictional areas summary

Water balances were undertaken on 7 interjurisdictional areas to highlight issues associated with managing water resources across state and territory boundaries and across large complex catchment systems.

Pirricoogoomoo Waterhole, Warburton Creek within the Lake Eyre Basin
 Image by Suse Hayes, sourced from SKM

Traditionally water balances are undertaken on small areas with detailed information available on that area. The balances undertaken for AWR 2005 which cover the interjurisdictional areas encompass more than a third of Australia when the Great Artesian Basin and Murray-Darling Basin are included. As such the reliability of these water balances is only as good as the lowest reliability data set. This mean that areas with no information or components of the water balance without data will prejudice the entire water balance reliability.

The Lake Eyre and Cooper Creek water balances were limited by data and information and hence the value of undertaking water balances on these areas was limited. Other works, such as the review of the hydrology of the Lake Eyre Basin completed in 2005 for the Department of Environment and Heritage, goes into more detail on specific components of the water balance and provide a more complex analysis of the hydrology. The AWR 2005 water balance does however highlight several data gaps and information deficiencies which could be further investigated. 

Another issue highlighted for interjurisdictional water balances was that jurisdictions define water balance components differently (e.g. farm dams), or they license the same components differently so that the information available on groundwater use (for example) may differ across state boundaries. Extensive work has been undertaken in recent years to ensure that licensing of water entities is more comparable across jurisdictions; however there are still significant components of the water balance that are not licensed or monitored for use, particularly water interception activities (flood harvesting, farm dams, forestry). These are areas that required further work before water balances for interjurisdictional areas will be of a high standard.

Summary components of the interjurisdictional water balance (volumes in GL)

Further discussion of the water balances for interjurisdictional areas is provided in the Water Availability National Perspective report, and the Regional Water Balances report, which are both available on the Publications page.

For individual results of water balance assessments go to Regional Water Resources Assessments

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